Memoirs and morsels from home and abroad

an urgent joie de vivre

I’m starting to sound like a broken record: I went to the farmers market, I bought too much, I baked, I cooked, I baked.

But how anyone doesn’t fall into this pattern eludes me, especially as August draws to a close. I wrote my most recent Jerusalem Post column about the lush rainbow of tomatoes and berries and stone fruits here in the northeast and finding ways to savor them during the last days of summer. I wrote about the rush to relax, the urgent joie de vivre that these fruits instill. (For more on this topic, check out what my friend Leah recently wrote about peaches in Saveur.)

In the JPost article, I shared two recipes that do more than just use the best of summer. They do more than just highlight the best of summer. They intensify the best of summer.

First, what do you get when you toss a handful of baby tomatoes with thick pomegranate molasses and slip them under a puff pastry crust? You might remember this recipe – it’s a tomato tarte tatin the produces the most concentrated tomato taste that I’ve ever tasted. The pomegranate molasses sweetens and tartens the tomatoes as they melt into a jam-like pulp.

Second, what do you get when you slip a handful of plums into a cake batter tinged with lime and rose? Well, you’ve already seen that cake with its tart plum juice dripping into the sweet floral cake. On a plum kick these days these days, I recreated the flavors in a much simpler cake with a batter that uses only one bowl and five minutes of your time. Because, as we all know, the less time in the kitchen, the more time to bask in the sunshine and drink rosé in the evenings.

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret. These recipes are also dig-your-heels-in, don’t-let-summer-go kinds of recipes that recreate that summer feeling when the farmers markets are in the rear view mirror. The small tomatoes, with their high flesh-to-seed ratio, used in the tarte tatin are also the best kind to buy year-round when other tomatoes are wan and mealy. In fact, I first made this tarte tatin towards the end of spring. As for the cake, use it as a base for any summer fruit that freezes well. I freeze fresh blueberries (I have a whole bag of wild ones in my freezer) and my mother likes peaches. Any change in texture of the fruit due to freezing doesn’t impact the cake since the fruit cooks and mushes and melts into the batter.

But, enough about looking ahead. For right now, let’s just look around.

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P.S. Click here to catch up on any JPost articles that you might have missed.

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Plum cake with lime and rose

This recipe was adapted from Rivka’s Easiest Cake Ever on Not Derby Pie. It lives up to its name as the simplest cake I’ve ever made. All you need is one bowl, one spoon, a cutting board and knife, and a pan. The batter is thick, but is still pourable. A few swipes of a spatula gets it right into the pan. The fruit juices ooze all over and dribble beautiful color throughout the cake. The plums I used were on the tart side, which played nicely against the sweet cake. I added lime zest and rose water (available in any Middle Eastern store, rose water is a nice complement to any red fruit including berries), but they can be replaced by equal amounts of lemon zest and vanilla.

Any type of juicy fruit works. Come fall, I make this cake with apples that I briefly cook them down with a bit of sugar to help them release their juices.

Serves 8-10

– 6-8 small plums or 4-6 large plums

– 1 C flour

– 3/4 C sugar

– 2 eggs

– 1/2 C canola oil

– 1 t baking powder

– 1 t rose water (or vanilla)

– 1 lime for zest

– Optional: 2-3 T demerara sugar, also called sugar in the raw or turbinado sugar

Prep. Preheat oven to 350˚F. Grease and flour a 9-inch cake pan, springform or square pan. (If you want to plate this, use a springform; otherwise, just serve it out of the pan.) Cut the plums into wedges (6 wedges per small plum, 8 wedges per large).

Mix. Mix together the remaining ingredients (except for the demerara sugar). You can mix this all by hand in less time than it takes to drag your stand mixer out of the cabinet.

Arrange. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. The batter is thick, so you’ll need a spatula to scoop it all out and then spread it evenly in the pan. Arrange the plum slices however you want and sprinkle with demerara sugar.

Bake. Bake the cake for 50-60 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.